Top 350 Arundhati Roy Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Coercing a woman out of a burka is as bad as coercing her into one. It’s not about the burka. It’s about the coercion.”

— Arundhati Roy

102. “And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have both won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.”

— Arundhati Roy

103. “Do you make all your life’s big decisions based on mobile phone videos?”

— Arundhati Roy

104. “By the time they got back, the lights were all out and everybody was asleep. Everybody, that is, except for Guih Kyom the dung beetle. He was wide awake and on duty, lying on his back with his legs in the air to save the world in case the heavens fell.”

— Arundhati Roy

105. “When you live in the United States, with the roar of the free market, the roar of this huge military power, the roar of being at the heart of empire, it’s hard to hear the whispering of the rest of the world. And I think many US citizens want to. I don’t think that all of them necessarily are co-conspirators in this concept of empire. And those who are not, need to listen to other stories in the world – other voices, other people.”

— Arundhati Roy

106. “Speaking for myself, I am no flag waver, no patriot, and I am fully aware that venality, brutality, and hypocrisy are imprinted on the leaden soul of every state. But when a country ceases to be merely a country and becomes an empire, then the scale of operations changes dramatically. So may I clarify that tonight I speak as a subject of the American empire? I speak as a slave who presumes to criticize her king.”

— Arundhati Roy

107. “A war that we have won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.”

— Arundhati Roy

108. “People who promote the free market and growth are far more romantic, and far more ideologically driven and blinded by their vision than somebody who goes in and comments about the beauty of a forest or the stars in the sky.”

— Arundhati Roy

109. “The fact is that America’s weapons systems have made it impossible for anybody to confront it militarily. So, all you have is your wits and your cunning, and your ability to fight in the way the Iraqis are fighting.”

— Arundhati Roy

110. “Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.”

— Arundhati Roy

111. “Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a ‘real’ war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other’s heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?”

— Arundhati Roy

112. “You begin to realize that hypocrisy is not a terrible thing when you see what overt fascism is compared to sort of covert, you know, communal politics which the Congress has never been shy of indulging in.”

— Arundhati Roy

113. “Nilekani’s technocratic obsession with gathering data is consistent with that of Bill Gates, as though lack of information is what is causing world hunger.”

— Arundhati Roy

114. “There’s no division on my bookshelf between fiction and nonfiction. As far as I’m concerned, fiction is about the truth.”

— Arundhati Roy

115. “Once you understand the process of corporate globalization, you have to see that what happened in Argentina, the devastation of Argentina by the IMF, is part of the same machine that is destroying Iraq. Both are efforts to break open and to control markets. And so Argentina is destroyed by the chequebook, and Iraq is destroyed by the cruise missile. If the chequebook won’t work, the cruise missile will. Hell hath no fury like a market scorned.”

— Arundhati Roy

116. “As a writer, one spends a lifetime journeying into the heart of language, trying to minimize, if not eliminate, the distance between language and thought.”

— Arundhati Roy

117. “The Believers come with their guns, their prayer beads and their own Destroy-Yourselves Manual.”

— Arundhati Roy

118. “Now we’re in a situation where democracy has been taken into the workshop and fixed, remodelled to be market friendly. So now the United States is fighting wars to install democracies. First is was topple them, now it’s install them. And the whole rise of corporate-funded NGOs in the modern world, this notion of CSR, corporate social responsibility – it’s all part of a New Managed Democracy. In a sense, it’s all part of the same machine.”

— Arundhati Roy

119. “The American people ought to know that it is not them, but their government’s policies, that are so hated.”

— Arundhati Roy

120. “Acceptance spells death to a writer.”

— Arundhati Roy

121. “The tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around eventually comes around.”

— Arundhati Roy

122. “Having wounded each other thus, deeply, almost mortally, the two sat quietly side by side on someone’s sunny grave, haemorrhaging.”

— Arundhati Roy

123. “We’re told, often enough, that as a species we are poised on the edge of the abyss. It’s possible that our puffed-up, prideful intelligence has outstripped our instinct for survival and the road back to safety has already been washed away. In which case there’s nothing much to be done. If there is something to be done, then one thing is for sure: those who created the problem will not be the ones who come up with a solution.”

— Arundhati Roy

124. “The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.”

— Arundhati Roy

125. “She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes.”

— Arundhati Roy

126. “In Kashmir when we wake up and say “Good Morning” what we really mean is “Good Mourning.”

— Arundhati Roy

127. “Globalization means standardization. The very rich and the very poor must want the same things, but only the rich can have them.”

— Arundhati Roy

128. “Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.”

— Arundhati Roy

129. “He held her as though she was a gift. Given to him in love. Something still and small. Unbearably precious.”

— Arundhati Roy

130. “Being with him made her feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them - as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.”

— Arundhati Roy

131. “It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that is purloined.”

— Arundhati Roy

132. “There are things that you can’t do – like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.”

— Arundhati Roy

133. “Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us.”

— Arundhati Roy

134. “Hide!′ she whispered. ‘The vegetarians are coming.”

— Arundhati Roy

135. “And once again, only the Small Things were said. The Big Things lurked unsaid inside.”

— Arundhati Roy

136. “When she looked at him now, she couldn’t help thinking that the man he had become bore so little resemblance to the boy he had been. His smile was the only piece of baggage he had carried with him from boyhood into manhood.”

— Arundhati Roy

137. “Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea-colored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored minds.”

— Arundhati Roy

138. “Enemies can’t break your spirit, only friends can.”

— Arundhati Roy

139. “It was the kind of time in the life of a family when something happens to nudge its hidden morality from its resting place and make it bubble to the surface and float for a while. In clear view. For everyone to see.”

— Arundhati Roy

140. “It had been quiet in Estha’s head until Rahel came. But with her she had brought the sound of passing trains, and the light and shade that falls on you if you have a window seat.”

— Arundhati Roy

141. “Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.”

— Arundhati Roy

142. “Rahel drifted into marriage like a passenger drifts towards an unoccupied chair in an airport lounge.”

— Arundhati Roy

143. “He had seen her through so much; he believed that if not he, then certainly music, would see her through this too.”

— Arundhati Roy

144. “Love, after all, is the ingredient that separates a sacrifice from ordinary, everyday butchery.”

— Arundhati Roy

145. “Breathe gently here, for with fragility all is fraught, Here, in this workshop of the world, where wares of glass are wrought.”

— Arundhati Roy

146. “Politeness. Obedience. Loyalty. Intelligence. Courtesy. Efficiency.”

— Arundhati Roy

147. “Silence hung in the air like secret loss.”

— Arundhati Roy

148. “Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It.”

— Arundhati Roy

149. “Trees raised their naked, mottled branches to the sky like mourners stilled in attitudes of grief.”

— Arundhati Roy

150. “It was not entirely his fault that he lived in a society where a man’s death could be more profitable than his life had ever been.”

— Arundhati Roy